A little tiny ENORMOUS fact about the war that seems to have gone unmentioned until now is that, while Iraq is lousy with oil, none of it is in the Sunni areas.
Which means that a postwar partitioned Iraq, or even a loosely federal Iraq, will leave the Shi'ites and Kurds with the prospect of becoming rich, and the Sunnis with an economy of which the main export will be poverty.
So the only acceptable scenario for the Sunnis is a strong centralized government. The Iraqi experience of strong centralized governments has been that they divide society into the Ins and the Outs, where being an Out is both impoverishing and dangerous. So the Sunni objective is for a strong centralized government - which they control.
The Sunnis are fighting for a future in which they have oil and power, as in the past. The alternative is that they will have neither. In practice, if the Sunnis have the power, they will have the oil revenues too.
If there were oil in every part of Iraq, there might still be fighting over allocation of more or less. Because there is no oil in the Sunni areas, the fight is all or nothing.
This is compounded by the fact that the Shi'ites have historically been a subject class to the Sunnis, so a democracy dominated by the majority Shi'ites has overtones of a servile revolt, of the unwashed servant class taking over.
Since there is no politically acceptable discourse except Islam which openly denies the desirability of democracy, that is what the Sunni claim to be fighting for.
After all this time, we find out that it really is all about oil, just as the naysayers said at the very beginning. But that was before the war degenerated from an invasion, which was not about Iraqi oil, into a civil war, which is. It may now be degenerating still further into a generalized melee without clear sides or issues. If it does, the next stage should be a form of warlordism as emerged in Afghanistan after the war against the Soviets degenerated into melee.
No comments:
Post a Comment